THE GIG

Berne Notice

 

Programming Note: I’m in Philadelphia this weekend, taking part in an Ars Nova Workshop Composer Portrait series on alto saxophonist-composer Tim Berne. Originally I was scheduled for a pre-concert talk on Friday, but my jury service has shuffled the deck a bit. So now it’s 6:30 p.m. Saturday. I’ll be speaking with Steve Byram, the influential graphic designer who has worked closely with Berne for years.

One reason I was booked for Friday: that’s when Berne and the Collide Saxophone Quartet (with guitarist Marc Ducret) will perform music from The Sevens, a 2002 release on New World Records. I wrote liner notes for that release -- note: the link goes to a PDF -- and somehow, reading now, they don’t make me cringe. (Not much, at least.) I now heed a general house-policy prohibition against liner notes, but I’m glad I had the chance to tackle these.

Back to this weekend. Saturday looks to be every bit as engaging, with one set apiece by Berne’s new band, Adobe Probe, and Philadelphia-based pianist Matt Mitchell. I haven’t heard the music for either of these settings, but I did enjoy a recent interview conducted by David Adler for the online magazine of the Philadelphia Music Project.

Where, you might ask, is Steve Byram in all this? Pretty much everywhere. And I expect our conversation to range from visual aesthetics to musical details, encompassing the considerable overlap therein. Here, warm up with an image gallery at Screwgun Records. 

(Unrelated Byram-Berne image.)

In a World Gone Mad

As is often the case with appointment television, I came late to the game on Mad Men, the AMC chronicle of Madison Avenue in a martini-swilling age. At this point I’m done with the first season, and have yet to tackle the second. On Sunday night I cheated and watched the Season 3 premiere, which struck me as oddly unimaginative -- certainly less creative than this summer’s ad campaign, a fitting combination of bombast and finesse. (You may have noticed the bus banners, or the Banana Republic storefronts, or the retro-cartoonish Facebook icons of your pals.) But I’ll leave the reviews to the seasoned pros, and to amateurs with a deeper investment than my own. 

One thing has been bugging me all along, though, and I wonder whether I’m the only one. The opening credits to the show, iconic enough to have earned their own Simpsons parody, ring stylish but hollow against the substance of the show. Every time I see them -- and that’s numbingly often, when you’re binging through a full season -- a part of me imagines how much better they could be.

Yeah, this is obsessive. But we’re talking about a show that takes period detail to fanatical extremes. From the fashion to the cocktails, nothing is left unconsidered here. In the world of Don Draper and his associates, image is everything, and so the show cleverly gives us a gleaming fabrication, an idealized and profoundly troubled milieu.